Archives for :
October2013

The RoboRaiders believe in the vision of inspiring young minds to be creative and eager to learn. In the past 2 months, starting from September up to the end of October, we reached out to 14 different schools in Lubbock, Texas, including high schools and middle schools and talked about FIRST Robotics and its mission. In addition to that, we let the students know what Team 1817 is all about, the outreach events we do, the technical projects we encourage and build season!

The purpose of this is to get students to be part of FRC and get them excited about robotics as well as STEM Education! We had two of our robots, from 2010 and 2012, to show off and the students loved them!

We have a Student Info Session coming up on November 5th at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Building, ECE 101 – Lankford Room from 6 – 8 pm at Texas Tech University. The students will get to know more about FIRST and the team, as well as meet the mentors and other Robots. We look forward to seeing these young minds become a part of this Robotics team!

The RoboRaiders participate in more than just FIRST. We are also heavily involved in BEST. BEST is a 6 week long robotics competition that takes place during the fall. This year’s competition was called “Gatekeeper”, and the objective of it was to build a robot that could build a CPU. For more information about this year’s competition please visit http://www.bestinc.org/. The three key events that go on during BEST are Kick Off (September 7th), Trial Run (October 5th), and Game Day (October 19th). For all three of these events everyone on Team 1817 that could, helped with set up, clean up, as well as helped out during the events to make sure everything ran smoothly. In addition many of our RoboRaiders helped with the construction of the playing field, as well as mentored any teams that were having trouble building or programming their robot. We also campaigned to get other students from Texas Tech University to get involved with BEST and to come volunteer. Many of the student organizations on campus joined us in volunteering their time for BEST. Some of them were NSBE, IEEE, SWE, SHPE, and HKN.

At Kick off we ha a total of 21 teams excited and ready for this year’s competition to begin. It was a long and busy 6 weeks for these teams, but they were making good progress. During Trial Run there were already many teams with working robots or almost working robots. Other teams were there brainstorming and figuring out how to improve their robots. It was a fun and exciting day and we think the teams got a lot out of it. When Game day finally came along everyone was pumped and ready to compete. Game day went really well and everyone seemed to have a lot of fun. The top four teams went on to nationals. All in all this BEST season ended successfully.

On October 1st, Team 1817 held a mentor info session for students interested in joining RoboRaiders. We gave a power-point presentation on what it meant to be a mentor on Team 1817, as well as showcased Meatloaf to about 15-20 Texas Tech students. After the presentation, students were able to talk directly with the current mentors about what the team does and how they could join RoboRaiders. Team 1817 is still looking for new mentors for the upcoming build season. If you missed the info session you can still contact us at Team1817@gmail.com if you are looking to join the team, or if you want to learn more about any upcoming events we might be hosting.

On October 4th, 2013, we the RoboRaiders went out to the Advanced Technology Center to talk about the FIRST Robotics high school program. Mr. Frank Anderson, the LISD CAD Instructor, welcomed us to his CAD classes throughout the day. We presented our 2010 robot to the students and showed them how FIRST robotics can provides them opportunities to build robots, get hands on experience in engineering, and have fun altogether.

On Friday Sept. 20th the RoboRaiders got to show off our 2010 robot “Meatloaf.” We had a booth set up at Texas Tech University’s Parents Night Dinner, where we were telling families of new students what we do, what FIRST is, and about engineering at Texas Tech. We wowed young kids there with Meatloaf’s exciting crab drive, we even let them try their hand at driving an FRC robot. A lot of people were fascinated with our team and our robot, one dad of a student talked to us for 20 minutes about what we do and how we do it. Overall it was a successful night.